Family Plot Read online

  “Here,” he said, draping this hitherto unromantic garment over her shoulders. “You need this more than I do.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t,” her ladyship protested. “The wind is so brisk, and you only in your shirtsleeves!”

  “You would prefer everyone at the inn to think you married a man so careless of his wife’s comfort?” Pickett chided. “Now who is traducing whose character?”

  “Very well,” Lady Fieldhurst laughingly conceded, tugging the front of his coat closed over her bosom. “But how ungentlemanly of you to throw my own words back in my teeth!”

  “You knew I wasn’t a gentleman when you ‘married’ me,” he reminded her.

  “Very true; in fact, it was a large part of your charm.”

  He took her arm, and together they started back up the beach, hindered considerably by her wind-whipped skirts tangling about their legs. By the time the lights of the inn came into view the sky was fully dark, yet Pickett was conscious of a pang of disappointment at having reached their destination so quickly. It occurred to him that he would not object if the case of the mysterious Miss Kirkbride were to take a very long time to solve.

  CHAPTER 7

  IN WHICH JOHN PICKETT TESTS HIS SEA

  LEGS AND FINDS THEM WANTING

  * * *

  The following morning, Pickett and Harold arose early and set out on foot for the village some half a mile beyond the inn. The trek, though not of long duration, was made tedious for Pickett due to the fact that he was obliged to listen to a catalog of Miss Kirkbride’s virtues, which were apparently many.

  “Oh, I can’t begin to explain it!” said Harold after several abortive attempts. “From the moment I saw her lying there on the beach with her hair splayed out over the sand, it was just that—just that—”

  “ ‘That I should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it, she is so above me,’ ” Pickett paraphrased wistfully.

  “That’s it!” exclaimed Harold, much struck. “That’s it exactly! How did you know?”

  “It’s Shakespeare,” Pickett said, then added cryptically, “he speaks for us all.”

  “Is that so? I’ve never thought much of those Elizabethan fellows before—they wore codpieces, you know—codpieces! But I see I shall have to pay more attention in the future.”

  Upon arriving in the village, they chose at random one tavern among several crowded up to the harbor, the better to provide for the liquid requirements of the many men who derived their living from fishing the waters of the Irish Sea. Once inside, Pickett stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the shadowy interior after the brightness of the morning sun sparkling on the waves. As he had suspected, the tavern clearly catered to the fisherfolk, as evidenced by the nets and sea glass adorning the walls, as well as the slate mounted behind the bar with the day’s high and low tides written in chalk. The establishment was busy even at this early hour, its patronage being mostly made up of elderly fishermen who had yielded their places at sea to their juniors, whose manners and morals they now spent their days cheerfully bemoaning. One white-haired ancient scarcely looked up from his hands, which appeared to be employed in carving the hull of a tiny boat from the cork of a wine bottle. Four others glanced up only for a moment before resuming their game of cards.

  “Good morning,” Pickett said, addressing the burly man behind the bar. Suspecting that, as an outsider, he probably had captured the attention of every man in the place in spite of their apparent lack of interest, he launched into the tale that he, Lady Fieldhurst, and Harold had previously agreed upon. “I wonder if there is any man here who would be willing to take my nephew and me out for a pleasure jaunt on the water? Harold here has been offered a berth as a midshipman in His Majesty’s Navy, but never having been at sea, he’s not certain how well he would take to it.”

  Some half-dozen old-timers listened to this speech without expression. Just when Pickett decided he was going to be ignored by the lot of them, one rose and shot a stream of brown liquid from his mouth into a battered brass spittoon positioned beside his chair.

  “In my day,” he said at last, scowling at Harold, “a lad his age was set to work whether he’d a mind to it or no.”

  “Yes, well, I agree with you there,” Pickett said, improvising rapidly, “but his mother would not hear of it, until the young scoundrel got himself sent down from school. For fighting,” he added, slanting a loaded glance at Harold’s fading bruises.

  To his credit, Harold was quick to pick up his rôle in the little drama. “You should see the other fellow,” he put in with some satisfaction.

  To Pickett’s relief, this demonstration of mettle on Harold’s part, far from earning their disapproval, actually served to elevate that young man in their estimation. “Aye, I’d sooner have a lad handy with his fists as some of these mealy-mouthed young’uns one sees these days,” the fisherman conceded. “Happen he’d do well in Farmer George’s navy, after all.”

  “Of course, we are prepared to offer compensation to any man with a vessel for hire.”

  Seeing the tide of public opinion turning in his favor, Pickett offered the price suggested by Lady Fieldhurst. This had seemed outrageously expensive to Pickett for a voyage lasting no longer than a couple of hours at the most, but the viscountess had insisted that a gentleman would not wish to appear niggardly, and so he had allowed himself to be guided by her. And she had apparently been quite correct, for the fisherman, with a gleam in his eye, noted that it was a fine day for sailing.

  “Boyd’s the name, Elliot Boyd,” he said. “I’d be right pleased to hae the pair of you aboard the Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

  He held out his hand, not to offer a handshake, but palm facing upward, inviting Pickett to pay in advance. Pickett ignored this gesture, knowing from experience that it was wisest to pay for services after they were rendered to one’s satisfaction. One of the lessons he had learned at his father’s knee, so to speak, involved offering to render, for a consideration, some small assistance to the ladies or gentlemen exiting Covent Garden Theatre, then to flee with one’s ill-gotten gain without exerting oneself on behalf of one’s patron at all. While Pickett had no doubt that both he and Harold could easily chase the elderly Boyd down, if it should come to that, he knew the wily old fisherman would certainly have other ways to fleece them, should he be inclined to take advantage of a pair of obvious landlubbers. So he made no attempt to reach for his coin purse yet, but turned to follow Boyd out of the tavern.

  Halfway to the door, Pickett paused to admire the handiwork of the man carving the wine cork.

  “You do good work,” he told the man, who was affixing a tiny canvas sail to the mast of his miniature boat. “Do you ever sell them?”

  “Aye, sometimes,” came the not very enlightening reply.

  “Harold has two young brothers who were bitterly disappointed at being left behind,” Pickett told him. “How much for two of the boats?”

  “A shilling each, and they’ll be ready on your return,” the man promised him.

  “I’ll give you a shilling for the pair upon my return,” Pickett said, determined not to be taken for a greenhorn.

  This offer was accepted (somewhat grudgingly, which assured Pickett that he had not fared too badly), and he and Harold accompanied Boyd out to the pier where the Bonnie Prince Charlie was tied up.

  “Yessir, a fine day for sailing,” Boyd observed.

  He stepped aboard the boat with the ease of long experience, and offered his hand to steady his passengers as they boarded the bobbing craft. Then he deftly untied the knot in the thick rope tethering them to the pier. He lowered the sails, which hung limply from the spars, then picked up a pair of oars and held one out to Harold.

  “Might as well learn a thing or two about seamanship,” he told the boy. “We’ll have to row a bit at first, until she catches the wind.”

  Harold took the oar from Boyd and set to with a will, rowing with such enthusiasm that the boat began to swing about i
n a sweeping arc.

  “Best slow down, lad, or you’ll be exhausted before we’ve made it past the shallows,” Boyd advised with a wink.

  Grinning sheepishly back at the older man, Harold let up on the oars, and soon the sails caught the wind, the canvas flapping as the little boat picked up speed, bobbing and dipping as it crested the waves.

  “I say!” Harold exclaimed. “I call this capital good fun! Don’t you think so?” he asked Pickett, but received no answer. “Mr.—Uncle John?”

  He looked back at Pickett, who sat clutching the gunwale with one hand and his belly with the other. “Capital,” Pickett echoed with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  “With your permission, I thought we’d go ’round the headland to the south,” Boyd said, turning the wheel.

  As this was precisely what Pickett had had in mind, he nodded in agreement, thankful to be spared the necessity of speaking. Like Harold, he had never been to sea before. But while that eager young man seemed to be reveling in the experience, Pickett found that his stomach attempted a series of acrobatic moves every time they met a wave.

  “Look, Uncle John!” Harold exclaimed, pointing out a building of grey stone on the shore adjacent to them. “There’s the inn!”

  Pickett nodded in acknowledgment, but found himself scanning the shore in spite of his wretchedness, looking at the inn and trying to determine which of its many windows belonged to Lady Fieldhurst.

  In this manner they rounded the headland, Harold glorying in the feel of the salty wind in his hair while Pickett endured the ordeal in quiet misery. But he knew where his duty lay, and so as soon as he saw Ravenscroft Manor atop the cliff, he called to Boyd.

  “At the inn there’s been talk of a female found somewhere along the beach here.”

  Boyd nodded. “Aye, old Angus Kirkbride’s lass. Quarreled with the old man years ago, and turned up on the shore there with no memory of who she was nor how she came to be there.”

  “Could she have fallen from a boat and washed ashore?” Pickett asked. He looked at the cliff. “I should have thought she would have been dashed to death upon the rocks.”

  “Aye, and so she would have been, if she’d come in with the tide. At high tide the waves wash right up to the cliff. See yon path climbing up the cliff to the big house? Can’t use it when the tide is high, for the foot of the path is clean underwater.”

  Pickett remembered the slate in the tavern marking the high and low tides. Clearly an understanding of such things would be crucial to these men whose livelihood depended upon the sea. “And how was the tide that morning? Do you remember?”

  “Aye, you’ll find everyone on the coast follows the tides right keenly. The tide turned just before dawn that day. I remember it particularly, for my lass Bessie’s husband—a good enough lad, though sadly lacking for common sense—was to have delivered a couple of halibut to Ravenscroft Manor that morning. But they weren’t biting that day, and he was hard-pressed to catch the fish and get them up to the big house ere the tide reached the full. By the time he got there, the house was all at sixes and sevens with the young lady seemingly come back home. The long and short of it is, by the time he got back down the cliff, the path was cut off, and the boat he’d left on the beach was adrift with no one aboard her.” He chuckled at the memory. “Aye, no common sense to speak of, but he’s good to my Bessie, so if she’s happy, I’m happy.”

  Pickett knew he had a few mental calculations to make, but he dared not appear to take more than a tourist’s passing interest in the case, and in his present state his brain could not seem to hear him over his stomach’s protests. Thankfully, Harold asked the questions Pickett couldn’t convince his brain to form.

  “How far apart do the tides come? That is, how long between high tide and low?”

  “About six hours, or a little more,” Boyd answered, having by this time recognized Harold as a kindred spirit. “We have two high and two low tides a day, although I believe that may be different in other parts of the world.”

  “Then the previous high tide would have been around midnight, and the next one would have come about noon,” Harold deduced.

  “Aye, or a little after.”

  “Why, she might have been lying there for hours! Only think, if no one had come along and found her, she might have been killed when the tide rose again,” Harold continued. “Drowned, or dashed upon the rocks.”

  Boyd found nothing to argue with in this conclusion. “Aye, she was a right lucky lass.”

  Lucky, Pickett thought, or very thorough in her planning. But was it possible that a woman unaccustomed to the sea could have calculated the tides so accurately, or would even have known of the need to do so? Pickett had lived his entire life within a mile of the River Thames, into which the North Sea tidal waters flowed, but he was unfamiliar with most of the information that the old fisherman was imparting to the enthralled Harold.

  “If she’d been lying there since midnight the night before, surely someone would have seen her,” Pickett reasoned. “Someone in a fishing boat must have noticed her, even if no one had come walking along the beach.”

  “You might think so, but if her clothes were dark, she might have been hard to make out against the rocks, especially around dawn, when the fishing boats set sail.” Boyd leaned over and spat into the sea. “Aye, it’s a mystery.”

  “Look, Mr. Boyd,” put in Harold, pointing toward a dark shape in the distance that was breaking the surface of the water at irregular intervals. “What’s that? Never mind, it’s gone now—no, wait! There it is!”

  “Aye, that’s a whale, lad. This one’s a bit closer to shore than usual, but they’re a frequent sight out at sea. There’s a spyglass in that sea chest, if you’d like to have a closer look.”

  Harold clambered over the various ropes and rigging littering the boat, dug in the sea chest, and soon lifted out his prize.

  “I say!” he exclaimed, fixing it on the whale. “This is something like!”

  “Seems to me you’re a natural-born sailor, Master Harold,” said Boyd, nodding his approval. “Pity I canna say the same for your uncle, there.”

  At that moment the boat lifted skyward on the crest of a large swell, then plunged downward. For a brief moment Pickett lost sight of the horizon and thereby his bearings. That one moment was all it took. He leaned over the gunwale and emptied his breakfast into the sea below.

  While Pickett and Harold set out to sea (having weathered the storm that had broken over their heads the previous evening, when Robert and Edward discovered their elder brother was to have the pleasure of spending the morning aboard a boat in the company of a Bow Street Runner), Lady Fieldhurst applied herself to the task of providing Mr. Pickett with the sketch he had requested. Fortunately, she had had the foresight to bring a portable writing desk on her journey, thinking to lighten her exile by writing frequent long letters to her dear friend Emily, Lady Dunnington. Now, however, it appeared Lady Dunning-ton would have to wait, as more pressing concerns took priority. After dispatching the sullen Robert and Edward to the beach under the watchful eye of the innkeeper’s daughter, Lady Fieldhurst shut herself up in her room with pencil and paper. By the time the morning was far enough advanced to permit calling at Ravenscroft Manor, she had produced a draft that, she thought, did not utterly disgrace her as an artist. She closed this up inside the writing desk, resolving to present it to Mr. Pickett at the first opportunity, then changed into an elegant walking costume of the ubiquitous black bombazine. She was just reaching for her gloves and bonnet preparatory to setting out for the Manor when the door was flung open and Pickett staggered into the room.

  “Oh, Mr. Pickett! I had just finished—” Her artwork was forgotten as she took in his unsteady gait and slightly greenish countenance. “Good heavens! What has happened to you?”

  He gave her a queasy little smile. “I’m afraid Harold has lost all respect for me. It seems I’m not much of a sailor.”

  She tossed her bonnet and gloves on th
e room’s only chair, Miss Kirkbride and her morning call forgotten. “And so you suffered from mal de mer. You poor man! Surely you did not have to walk all the way from the village in this condition! Come in and shut the door.”

  “No, I didn’t have to walk,” he said, obeying her behest, “for the greengrocer was making a delivery to Ravenscroft Manor, and Harold prevailed upon him to take us up in his—bowl!”

  Correctly interpreting this urgent command, she snatched up the bowl from the washstand and thrust it into his arms only just in time, then led him to the edge of the bed, where he might sit down with the bowl upon his knees.

  “I’m sorry to impose on you this way,” he said, when he could speak again. “But there were people in the corridor, so I dared not be seen entering Mr. Colquhoun’s room.”

  “No, indeed! You did quite right in coming here. Lie down, and you should feel better directly.” Anticipating his objection, she added, “I am just going to pay a call on Miss Kirkbride, as you requested, so you shall have the room all to yourself.”

  He looked longingly at the pillow, then down at his feet. “I shouldn’t—my boots—”

  “Need I remind you, Mr. Pickett, that I was married for six years? I am unlikely to fall into a faint at the sight of a man’s bare feet. I confess, I have never suffered from this particular malady, but I believe it is said to pass soon enough. A little rest and quiet is all that is required. You will be more comfortable with your coat off. Here, stand up so I may help you.”

  Suiting the word to the deed, she began stripping the slightly dampened coat from his shoulders. Too weak to protest, he submitted meekly to this treatment and withdrew his arms from the sleeves, then sank gratefully back down onto the bed.

  “Be careful, my lady, there is something in the pockets,” he cautioned as she draped the coat over the back of the chair.

  She slid her hand into one of the pockets and withdrew two miniature boats carved from cork, each topped with a tiny sail of real canvas.